South Carolina AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

No AI-specific instrument yet

This jurisdiction had issued no AI-specific ethics opinion, court rule, or formal guidance as of our last review. That does not make AI use ungoverned here: the existing rules of professional conduct — competence, confidentiality, supervision, and candor — apply to generative AI the way they apply to any other tool, and ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point most bars borrow in the meantime. The breakdown below covers what that means in practice; the changelog will record the week anything official issues.

An index inspected, page by numbered page

South Carolina’s negative is specific enough to re-run. As of July 1, 2026, page one of the South Carolina Bar’s Ethics Advisory Opinions index, which at inspection ran from opinion 26-01 back through 23-02, contained nothing on artificial intelligence, and no AI-specific court rule or formal bar guidance for attorneys surfaced anywhere else we checked. The tracker records the scope of the inspection alongside the date, because a negative is only as good as the search that produced it, a standard the methodology applies to every no-instrument state on the states index.

The interim policy, reported rather than read

South Carolina’s substantive AI development belongs to its courts’ internal governance, and this page handles it with deliberate care. Per the Judicial Branch’s announcement of August 15, 2025 and contemporaneous reporting, an interim policy governs the use of generative artificial intelligence by the state’s judges and court staff; the SC Daily Gazette’s September 3, 2025 coverage placed the chief justice among the state court leaders issuing orders on AI in their courtrooms. The reason for the attributed phrasing is a verification gap we disclose rather than paper over: the order document itself did not fetch for us, so we describe the policy on the strength of the issuing branch’s own announcement, link the order for readers, and assert nothing about its internal terms until the primary text is read. Two things are still worth saying now. The policy is real, announced by the branch that adopted it. And its audience is the bench and court staff, which means that even fully read it would be described here and excluded from the instrument count, the same scope ruling that keeps Delaware’s judicial-officer policy out of the dataset.

Context that predates the technology

South Carolina wrote technology into its competence commentary in 2019, adopting the technological-competence comment to Rule 1.1 years before generative AI reached law practice. That comment is why no South Carolina lawyer should read the empty instrument column as permission to stay ignorant of the tools: competence duties attach now, opinion or no opinion. The bar’s magazine has run AI pieces as well, and they are written by private authors under their own names, commentary that informs without governing, a distinction this tracker maintains everywhere because blurring it is how phantom authority gets cited.

The duties that fill the silence

A South Carolina lawyer using generative AI today practices on the national baseline. Confidentiality analysis comes before any client fact reaches a tool, the vendor-vetting walk-through of the Rule 1.6 breakdown. Verification stands between every AI output and every filing, the duty the sanctions survey shows courts enforcing with fines and referrals. Billing follows actual time per the fee ethics analysis, supervision runs office-wide per the supervision rules, and the policy template converts it all into a working document. ABA Formal Opinion 512 supplies the reasoning, individual judges can order more in any courtroom per the court orders guide, and the changelog will record the week South Carolina issues anything attorney-facing, or the interim policy’s text finally verifies.